Education: Joy Amina Garnett holds a BA in Humanities from McGill University and an MFA in Painting from the City College of New York. As an undergraduate, she studied classical Arabic at McGill and attended the American University in Cairo’s Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA). After graduating from McGill, she traveled to Paris and enrolled at L’École Nationale Supérieur des Beaux-arts before returning to New York to pursue her masters at City College.
Fellowships & awards: Garnett’s honors include an award from Anonymous Was A Woman, a writing fellowship at Yaddo, and residencies at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Creative Commons Dubrovnik, Croatia. She has received grants from United States Artists, the Therese Ralston McCabe Connor Fund, Chipstone Foundation Milwaukee, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Wellcome Trust, London, UK. While at Yaddo, she worked on her forthcoming memoir, The Bee Kingdom (Gaudy Boy, January 2027), an advance excerpt of which was Longlisted for the 2024 First Pages Prize in Creative Nonfiction.
Creative writing: Garnett’s short stories, which include freestanding excerpts from early drafts of The Bee Kingdom, have been published in Rusted Radishes, ellipse: journal of translation, Nashville Review, Evergreen Review, Ping-Pong, Two Coats of Paint, Full Blede, The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook (powerHouse Books, 2016), Vertov From V to A, edited by Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn (Ediciones la Calavera, 2008), and elsewhere.
Archives & research: Garnett first developed The Bee Kingdom as a multimedia art project (documented at thebeekingdom.art). Mining the visually rich materials left behind by her grandfather and immediate family members, she produced artist books, prints, and collages. Her memoir draws from the same source materials, weaving together a coming-of-age story with scholarly research, fragments of imagined histories, and reproductions of archival images. Garnett has been interviewed about her work-in-progress for ArabLit Quarterly, Hyperallergic, and 3Quarks Daily; her essays about her archival adventures have appeared in Arab Urbanism Magazine, Ibraaz, Bee World, and Baraza.
Editing: Garnett has served as the art director for the Evergreen Review since 2019. In 2025, she became the art director of SUSPECT, literary magazine of Singapore Unbound. From 2005-2016, she served as the art editor of Cultural Politics, a contemporary media theory journal published by Duke University Press. In 2005, Garnett launched the blog and newsletter for Visual AIDS while serving as an artist on its board. In the late 1990s, she founded and edited the guerrilla art news entity known as NEWSgrist— “where spin is art.”
Art writing: Garnett launched her column “Into Africa” (1999-2001) for artnet magazine while working at the Robert Goldwater Library in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. She has written about painting’s relationship to photography and electronic media, most notoriously for Harper’s, as well as Intelligent Agent and her column “Copy That!” at Art21 Magazine. Her essays can be found in art books and exhibition catalogs, including: Interaction: Artistic Practice in the Network, edited by Jordan Crandall and Amy Scholder (Eyebeam/DAP, 2001); Under Fire: The Organization and Representation of Violence, edited by Jordan Crandall (Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Rotterdam, 2 vols., 2004; 2005); Myself: A Conversation about Self-Portraiture, with Mira Schor (University of Nevada Reno, 2011); M/E/A/N/I/N/G (25th Anniversary Issue) edited by Mira Schor and Susan Bee (University of Pennsylvania and Duke University Press, 2011).
Scholarly writing: Garnett has contributed chapters to scholarly books, notably: Cultural Entanglement in the Pre-Independence Arab World: Arts, Thought, and Literature (IB Tauris/ Bloomsbury, 2020); Virilio and Visual Culture, and The Virilio Dictionary (both published in 2013 by Edinburgh University Press); and Virilio Now: Current Perspectives in Virilio Studies (Polity, 2011).
Exhibitions: Garnett’s first solo exhibition of paintings was held at Debs & Co, NY in 1999. Her work has since been shown at MoMA PS1, Whitney Museum of American Art, FLAG Art Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Artists Space, Smack Mellon, White Columns, Center for Book Arts, New York Academy of Sciences (all in New York), Milwaukee Art Museum, Bristol Art Museum, Roger Williams University Art Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Craft Portland, Boston University Art Gallery, Savannah College of Art & Design, Rubenstein Arts Center at Duke University, Illinois State University Galleries, Smithsonian traveling exhibitions, National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC), Wellcome Trust (London, UK), and the Witte Zaal (Ghent, Belgium).
Collections: Garnett’s paintings are held in the permanent collections of the National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC), Altria Group (Richmond, VA), West Collection (Oaks, PA), and in numerous private collections.
Press: Garnett’s paintings and exhibitions have been written about by Lucy Lippard, Tim Griffin, Christopher Phillips, Hilarie Sheets, Holland Cotter, Roberta Smith, Ken Johnson, Grace Glueck, Karen Rosenberg, Lauren O’Neill-Butler, RC Baker, Tyler Green, Kevin Pratt, Murtaza Vali, Carolina Miranda, Claudine Isé, Edith Newhall for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, New York Magazine, Harper’s, Perspecta: Yale School of Architecture Journal, Time Out New York, Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, The Brooklyn Rail, artnet, Hyperallergic, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, The Stranger, Musée Magazine, Newsday, The Huffington Post, WIRED, Cabinet Magazine, C Magazine, New American Paintings, and Bidoun.
Contact: joy.garnett [@] gmail.com
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